SMACK IS BACK
When Presidents and the Press Collude, the Scares
Never Stop
Excerpted from "Culture of Fear — Why Americans Are Afraid of The Wrong Things"
by Dr. Barry Glassner (see review at end of the excerpt.
Many scares, like Hollywood stars, have their heyday and then fade from
sight, more or less permanently. Witness panics over razor blades in
Halloween apples, abortion as a cause of cancer, or children dumping their
elderly parents at racetracks. Other fears have more staying power, as the
discussion of scares about black men suggests.
Another perennial scare owes its long run to powerful sponsorship.
For
three decades U.S. presidents and media organizations have worked in unison
to promote fears of drug abuse. Unlike almost every other hazard, illicit
drugs have no interest group to defend them. So they are safe fodder for
winning elections and ratings.
Drug abuse is a serious problem that deserves serious public
attention. But
sensationalism rather than rationality has guided the national conversation.
Misinformed about who uses drugs, which drugs people abuse, and with what
results, we waste enormous sums of money and fail to address other social
and personal problems effectively. Federal drug enforcement, a $6 million
expense in the 1960s, passed the $1 billion mark in the mid-1980s during
Ronald Reagan's presidency and more than $17 billion during Bill Clinton's.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, an era of budget cutting and distaste for
Big Government, agencies involved in drug control were about the only places
within the federal government to grow.
The money has been spent almost exclusively on curbing illegal
drugs, a
curious policy given that abuse of legal drags is a huge problem. More
Americans use legal drugs for nonmedical reasons than use cocaine or heroin;
hundreds of millions of prescription pills are used illicitly each year.
More than half of those who die of drug-related medical problems or seek
treatment for those problems are abusing prescription drugs. By the American
Medical Association's own estimates one in twenty doctors is grossly
negligent in prescribing drugs, and according to the Drug Enforcement
Agency, at least l5,000 doctors sell prescriptions to addicts and pushers.
Yet less than 1 percent of the nation's antidrug budget goes to stopping
prescription drug abuse.
The gargantuan disparity in spending reflects-and is perpetuated by
what the
nation's media and political leaders have chosen to focus onScares about
heroin, cocaine, and marijuana issue forth continually from politicians and
journalists. But except for burps when a celebrity overdoses, they have been
largely silent about the abuse of legal drugs.
A White House Tradition
It all started on April 9, 1970. An event at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue
inaugurated a new and lasting collaboration between presidents and the
media. At Richard Nixon's request, White House officials held a day-long
meeting with producers and executives from the major television networks,
production companies, and advertising agencies to enlist their support in
curtailing illegal drug use. Many of the most influential decision makers of
the TV industry participated.
Prior to the event, Jeb Magruder, a press secretary, described the
approach
he and his colleagues would take. "The individuals being invited think in
dramatic terms. We have therefore tailored the program to appeal to their
dramatic instincts," Magruder wrote in a memorandum. And indeed, throughout
the day undercover agents, potsniffing dogs, recovering addicts, and the
president himself paraded before the forty attendees. Nixon gave a
passionate speech about the need to "warn our youth constantly against the
dangers of drugs." Touted as "off the cuff", it had actually been written by
Patrick Buchanan, Nixon's chief speechwriter on social issues and himself a
candidate for the presidency a couple of decades later. "If this nation is
going to survive," Nixon intoned, "It will have to depend to a great extent
on how you gentlemen help raise our children." The TV guys ate it up. At
times there was hardly a dry eye in the whole hard-boiled crowd," according
to a producer who attended. So successful was the White House event, not
only did network stories about drug abuse about drug abuse increase, many of
TV's top dramatic series-"Marcus Welby, M.D.," "Hawaii Five-O," "The Mod
Squad"-had episodes with antidrug themes during the next season.
Presidents prior to Nixon had not made drug abuse a prime focus of
concern
for themselves or the media. But every subsequent commander-in-chief has
actively solicited the media to the cause. "In the newsrooms and production
rooms of our media centers, you have a special opportunity with your
enormous influence to send alarm signals across the nation," Ronald Reagan
urged, and he has been proven right. After Reagan's successor, George Bush,
declared in his first televised address as president that "the gravest
domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs," the number of stories on
network newscasts tripled over the coming few weeks, and public opinion
changed significantly. In a nationwide survey conducted by the New York
Times and CBS two months into the media upsurge, 64 percent of those polled
selected drugs as the country's greatest problem, up from 20 percent five
months earlier.
David Fan, a professor at the University of Minnesota, conducted a
study in
which he correlated the number of stories in major print media that included
the phrase "drug crisis" with variations in public opinion from 1985 through
l994. At times during that period only one in twenty Americans ranked drug
as the nation's most important problem; at other times nearly two out of
three did. The immense variations could be explained, Fan showed, by changes
in the press coverage.
Psychologists call this the availability heuristic. We judge how
common or
important a phenomenon is by how readily it comes to mind. Presented with a
survey that asks about the relative importance of issues, we are likely to
give top billing to whatever the media emphasizes at the moment, because
that issue instantly comes to mind. Were there a reasonable correspondence
between emphases in the media and the true severity of social problems, the
availability heuristic would not be problematic. When it comes to drug
crises, however, the correspondence has been lousy, owing in no small
measure to bad information from the nation's top political leader. President
Bush's speech in 1980 remains the most notorious example. While addressing
the nation live from the Oval Office via all three TV networks, held up a
sealed plastic bag marked "EVIDENCE." "This is crack cocaine seized a few
days ago by Drug Enforcement agents in a park across the street from the
White House," Bush said "It's as innocent looking as candy, but it's
murdering our children."
The Washington Post subsequently corrected the president's report.
At
Bush's request DEA agents tried to find crack in Lafayette Park but failed,
Post reporters learned. There was little drug dealing of any sort in that
park, and no one selling crack. With Bush's speech already drafted to
include the baggie prop, the agents improvised. In another part of town they
recruited a young crack dealer to make a delivery across from the White
House (a building he needed directions to find). When he delivered the crack
the DEA agents, rather than "seizing" it, as Bush would report, purchased it
for $2,400.
In the aftermath of this sham one might have expected reporters and
news
editors to become leery of presidentially promoted drug scares; by and large
they did not. Although irate about the phony anecdote, journalists generally
endorsed the conclusion it had been marshalled to prove. "With the country
and the nation's capital ensnared in a drug problem of dramatic proportions,
there did not seem to be a need to confect a dramatic situation to suit the
needs of a speech," wrote Maureen Dowd in a front-page article in the New
York Times that summed up a predominant sentiment within the press.
But maybe confection had been required. Over the previous decade
drug use
in the United States had declined considerably. And theatrics may have
seemed particularly necessary when it came to crack cocaine. For the
previous few years politicians and journalists had been presenting crack as
"the most addictive drug known to man ...an epidemic..." (Newsweek, 1986),
though neither characterization was true. A year before Bush's speech the
Surgeon General had released studies showing that cigarettes addict 80
percent of people who try them for a length of time, while fewer than 33
percent of those who try crack become addicted. Never among the more popular
drugs of abuse, at the height of its popularity crack was smoked heavily by
only a small proportion of cocaine users
Drugs to Ease Collective Guilt
As a sociologist I see the crack panic of the 19808 as a variation on
an
American tradition. At different times in our history drug scares have
served to displace a class of brutalized citizens from the nation's moral
conscience.
Flash back for a moment to the early 1870s in San Francisco.
Chinese
laborers, indispensable in building the transcontinental railroad during the
previous decade, had become a superfluous population in the eyes of many
whites. With an economic depression under way and 20,000 Chinese immigrants
out of work, politicians, newspaper reporters and union leaders all pointed
to opium dens as evidence of the debauchery of Chinese men, whom they
proposed to exclude from jobs and further immigration.
In actuality, opium dens, like British pubs, were genial gathering
places
where men shared stories and few participants were addicts. But as popularly
portrayed, opium dens were squalid places in which wasted men fought with
one another and defiled white women and Children. "What other crimes were
committed in those dark fetid places when these little innocent victims of
the Chinamen's wiles were under the influence of the drug, are almost too
horrible to imagine," Samuel Gompers, president of American Federated Labor
(the AFL), wrote in a pamphlet titled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion.
Out of that line of reasoning came the nation's very first drug
prohibition
law, a San Francisco ordinance of 1875 that outlawed opium dens. Other
antiopium and anti-Chinese laws followed in the coming decades, justified in
part by the simple, chimerical precept"If the Chinaman cannot get along
without his 'dope,' we can get along without him," as a committee of the
American Pharmaceutical Association put it.
Similarly, in the 1980s as poverty, homelessness, and associated
urban ills
increased noticeably, Presidents Reagan and Bush, along with much of the
electorate, sidestepped the suffering of millions of their fellow citizens
who had been harmed by policies favoring the wealthy. Rather than face up to
their own culpability, they blamed a drug. "Crack is responsible for the
fact that vast patches of the American urban landscape are rapidly
deteriorating," Bush's drug czar, William Bennett, decreed.
A by-product of social and economic distress, crack became the
explanation
for that distress. American society still suffers repercussions of this
perverse reasoning. In the late 1980s Congress mandated prison sentences one
hundred times as severe for possession of crack, the form of cocaine for
which African Americans are disproportionately arrested, as compared to
cocaine powder, the type commonly used by whites Partly as a consequence of
that legislation, by the mid 1990s three out of four people serving prison
sentences for drug offenses were African American, even though several times
as many whites as blacks use cocaine. In federal courts 94 percent of those
tried for crack offenses were African American. In 1995 the U.S. Sentencing
Commission, whose recommendations had never previously been refused, urged
greater parity and noted that there was no rational basis for the
inconsistency in sentencing. The White House and Congress, rather than risk
being called "soft on drugs," aggressively opposed their recommendations,
and by a vote of 332 to 83 they were struck down in the House of
Representatives. That vote, along with the disparities in the justice
system, prompted rioting by inmates in federal prisons, suspicions among
African Americans of government conspiracies against them, and increased
tensions between the races.
Busting Boomers' Chops
It wasn't supposed to be that way. When Bush's successor, Bill
Clinton won
the white House in 1992, pundits predicted that ill-conceived drug policies
and excessive fear mongering would die down. For a while it looked as if
they were right. But then, in his bid for reelection in 1996, Clinton faced
an opponent who tried to capitalize on his quiet. "Bill Clinton isn't
protecting our children from drugs," the announcer on a Bob
Dole-for-President TV ad exclaimed. "Clinton's liberal drug policies have
failed." To which the president responded by upping the ante, thereby
positioning himself as more antidrug than his opponent. In the near future,
Clinton warned, the "drug problem will be almost unbearable, unmanageable
and painful" unless the Republican party, which controlled Congress, where
Dole served as Senate Majority Leader, approved an additional $700 million
to fight the problem.
Clinton won reelection and got the money. But his continued
occupancy of
the White House afforded his political opponents and the media another hook
on which to hang a drug scare. During Clinton's second term his daughter,
Chelsea, finished high school and began her college career-a peak
developmental period for drug experimentation. Though there was no hint that
Chelsea used drugs, the fact that Clinton and others of his generation had
done so was taken as grounds for asserting that "Baby Boomers Tolerate Teen
Drug Use" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1996).
In tracing the history of scares several times I found that they stay
around and reproduce themselves the way mosquitoes do, by attaching to
whomever is available. By the mid-1980s, in line with the anti-1960s
sentiment of the era, TV news programs had already started running reports
that recycled footage of hippies in Haight Ashbury and characterized boomers
as "dropping out and getting high" in the 1960s, only to drop back in as
parents, "still getting high ... teaching the next generation to
self-destruct, one line, one drink, one toke at a time" (CBS, 1986). That
the negative image of "flower children ...educating their own teenaged
children about drugs" (as an article in the Detroit News put it in 1996) had
little basis in reality mattered not at all. Only a miniscule portion of the
baby boom generation ever qualified as "flower children" in the first place,
and far fewer were potheads than myth would have it. But such facts did not
stop news correspondents from rewriting boomers' drug history and current
attitudes toward drug use.
"The children of the sixties have kids of their own and a new conflict
with
the generation gap. This time, it's about their own drug use and what to
tell their children about their past," Deborah Roberts proclaimed on ABC's
"20/20" in 1997 as a Jefferson Airplane song played in the background and
stock footage of hippies filled the screen. Boomer parents who had gotten
high in their youth are in a no-win situation, Roberts suggested. They can
take a "do as I say, not as I did" approach and risk being branded
hypocrites by their children, E or they can lie about their drug use and
sacrifice any right to demand honesty from their kids in return.
Roberts and her producers apparently paid no mind to evidence
showing that
few parents actually experienced that dilemma. A year before the "20/20"
broadcast a nationwide survey found that 40 per cent of parents had never
tried marijuana and more than three-quarters believed that a parent should
never allow a child to take drugs. Fewer than one in ten said they felt
hypocritical in forbidding their own children from using drugs. Most seemed
to feel the way Bill Clinton did when ABC's Peter Jennings suggested on
another ABC program that "a lot of people at home," knowing he's "a baby
boomer president," consider it hypocritical of him to tell Chelsea to avoid
drugs. "I think this business about how the baby boomers all feel too
guilt-ridden to talk to their kids," a slightly exasperated Clinton replied,
"is the biggest load of hooey I ever heard."
Although scares about boomer parents have popped up frequently,
they boil
down to a non sequitur"Many baby-boomer parents of teen drug users
probably used drugs themselves, and therefore have not offered stern enough
warnings about the dangers" (New York Times, 1996). The first part of the
statement is true, but the second doesn't follow; most boomers who have used
drugs say they have cautioned their kids about the dangers. Should they have
been more stern in their warnings? Not if adolescent drug use is a form of
rebellion, as some experts believe. Parents who make a big deal about drugs
might provoke more of the behavior they are attempting to prevent.
This Is the Media on Drugs
Hectoring Is exactly what parents have been told they should do.
"Every
time that a parent is with their child, it's an opportunity for them to
discuss drugs," a physician from the American Academy of Pediatrics urged
with a straight face on ABC's "Good Morning America" in 1997. Parents who
took his prescription literally must have had some curious interchanges with
their offspring"That's great news about your straight A's, let's talk
about LSD."
Presumably the doctor himself would acknowledge the absurdity of
his dictum,
at least in retrospect. He'd gotten caught up in the fervor of the times, or
more accurately, of the network on which he was appearing. He made his
comment during what ABC called its "March Against Drugs"-an unprecedented
overdosing of antidrug propaganda throughout an entire month in 1997. Every
news show and almost every other program as well, including sitcoms, soaps,
and sports events, contained at least one advertisement, plot line, feature
story, or interview segment cautioning against teen drug abuse. The
onslaught concluded on March 31 with an interview with President Clinton in
which he goaded parents to lecture their children about drugs and thanked
ABC for providing "a great service to the country."
Some groups of parents came in for particularly harsh criticism
during the
network's MAD month. Boomers got bashed repeatedly, as did single mothers.
News stories and entire episodes of entertainment programs focused on
unmarried, addicted moms and on single women who abstain from drug use
themselves but failed to pay attention to the early signs of abuse in their
offspring. An episode of the sitcom "Grace Under Fire" brought a whole slew
of such themes together when Grace, a casualty of the 1960s, finds drugs in
her son's room and has trouble taking a hard line with him.
ABC's harangue elicited criticism from media critics as well as from
authorities on drug abuse. Pointing out that intensive scare campaigns
usually fail to dissuade young people from taking drugs and may even
backfire, they also criticized the network for biased news reporting.
Instead of providing a variety of points of view about drug use, news
programs stuck closely to the same story lines that in soaps and public
service advertisements throughout the month. News correspondents and
anchors, rather than provide levelheaded examinations of America's drug
problems and plausible remedies, rambled on about how schoolchildren "can
get marijuana faster than a Popsicle," and how "more and more teens are
falling for heroin's fatal allure."
The Return of Heroin
Critics understandably accused ABC, which had fallen from first to
last
place among the big three networks over the previous two years, of engaging
in a ratings grab"cause-related marketing," they call it in the trade. In
my view, however, the charge is not entirely fair. All of the scares the
network put out that month had been promoted by the rest of the media as
well over the past decade. In touting a resurgence in heroin use, for
example, ABC was merely singing one of the media's favorite tunes. Year
after year, even though Americans reportedly accounted for only about 5
percent of the world's heroin market and usage levels remained fairly
stable, headlines proclaimed, "The Return of a Deadly Drug Called Horse"
(U.S. News & World Report, 1989), "Heroin Is Making a Comeback," (New York
Times, 1990) or "Smack's Back" (USA Today, 1994).
Most heroin users are neither middle class nor young, but those
groups
regularly serve as the pegs for stories about heroin's resurgence. As far
back as 1981 Newsweek was reporting that heroin had migrated from the ghetto
and created "middle-class junkies," a muddled assertion repeated
periodically ever since. As evidence of a "middle-class romance with heroin"
(New York Times, 1997), reporters and politicians concentrate on various
high-profile groupsWall Street stockbrokers, fashion models, professional
athletes. And perpetually they proclaim that "heroin has its deadly hooks in
teens across the nation" (USA Today, 1996).
Smack has become "the pot of the '90s...as common as beer," USA
Today
declared; "The New High School High," ABC titled a special edition of its
newsmagazine, "turning Point." According to Peter Jennings on ABC's "World
News Tonight," the disturbing comeback" of heroin among the young is "almost
impossible to exaggerate...a cautionary tale for all parents and all
children." Yet in support of these drastic contentions reporters offered
only vague, emotion-laden evidence. On "Turning Point," Dianne Sawyer
effused"The statistics are heartbreaking. In the last few years, hundreds
and hundreds of young people have died from heroin. Some were among the best
and the brightest-star athletes, honor students, kids with promise."
To come up with their few examples or such fatalities, her producers
must
have had to search far and wide. With less than 1 percent of high school
students trying heroin in a given year and the bulk of heroin use
concentrated among inner-city adults, heroin is one of the least common
causes of death among teens.
Michael Massing, an author who writes frequently about drug abuse,
recounted
in an essay in the New York Review of Books"Not long ago, I had a
telephone call from an ABC producer who was working on a program about the
resurgence of heroin. 'We're trying to get some middle-class users-people
who are sniffing, rather than injecting,' she said, asking for some leads. I
said that while middle-class use somewhat increased, most of the new
consumption was occurring among inner-city minorities. '0h, they've been
around for years,' she said. 'The fact that heroin is spreading into other
sectors is what people will sit up and listen to.'"
Good Numbers Gone Bad
Some journalists do make a point, of course, of combating
exaggerations
with facts. Christopher Wren, who covers drug issues for the New York Times,
is particularly conscientious in this regard. When President Clinton joined
in the teen heroin scare by telling a group of mayors in 1997, "We now see
in college campuses and neighborhoods, heroin becoming increasingly the drug
of choice," Wren included the quote in his article about the speech but
immediately put the president's comment in its proper context. Although
there had been reports of heroin experimentation at certain colleges, Wren
noted, alcohol still retained its title as the drug of choice among the
nation's high school and college students, with marijuana a distant second.
As a rule, though, reporters maximize claims about youthful drug
abuse
rather than contextualizing them. Most of the major media ran stories about
a survey released in 1997 by a research center at Columbia University headed
by Joseph Califano, the former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.
There had been a huge increase in the use of hard drugs by young kids,
several of the stories reported. Specifically, 23.5 percent of
twelve-year-olds (more than twice as many as the previous year) reported use
of cocaine, heroin, or LSD. In reality, the 23.5 percent figure represented
the percentage of twelve-year-olds who said they knew someone who used those
drugs, not their own drug use. While most reporters did not conceal that the
question had been asked this way, they called the survey "an urgent new
alarm to address what many label a growing crisis" (CNN), and their stories
appeared beneath headlines such as, "Poll Finds Sharp Rise in Drug Use Among
Youngster" (Los Angeles Times). When I first read the alarmist statistic red
lights went off in my head. General readers and viewers, however, would have
to be uncommonly attentive to how the question is worded to register that
the true finding isn't as "alarming" (NBC) as the media made it seem.
The Califano poll showed only that about one in four
twelve-year-olds was
willing to speculate about a friend or classmate having used hard drugs.
Just a week earlier the results of a far larger and more trusted poll had
come out, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. That survey asked
people about their own drug taking and found teen drug use down almost 17
percent, with the steepest decline among twelve to fifteen-year-olds.
Indeed, when Califano subsequently released more detailed results
from his
survey a month after his press blitz, it turned out that an overwhelming
number of twelve-year-olds - 71 percent - said their schools were entirely
drug free. And as for use by friends, only 4 percent said that half or more
of their friends even used marijuana, never mind hard drugs. Three out of
four said that if someone were using illegal drugs at school, they would
report them.
In drug abuse surveys America's adolescents report increases in
consumption
of particular drugs sometimes and decreases other times. More important in
the long run is the most consistent finding in these surveys, one that the
news media seldom mentionThe great majority of adolescents never or hardly
ever use drugs. Fully three-quarters of twelve to seventeen-year-olds
report, year after year, that in the past twelve months they have not used
drugs at all-not so much as a puff of pot. For hard drugs, only about ten to
fifteen out of a thousand report using them as frequently as once a month.
Even among college students drug use is less pervasive than the hype would
have it. Half of America's college students make it to graduation without
having smoked marijuana; better than eight out of ten have not tried cocaine
in any form.
The vast majority of teens who do use drugs in high school or
college give
them up by their early thirties. A study that tracked more than 33,000 young
Americans over an eighteen-year period found that drug use decreases
dramatically when people marry. The only substance most users do not give up
in early adulthood, the study found, is cigarettes. Of those who smoked half
a pack or more a day as seniors in high school, seven out of ten were still
smoking at age thirty-two.
Poster Girl for the Drug Crisis
Drug scares are promoted primarily by three meanspresidential
proclamations, selective statistics, and poster children. The first two
posit a terrifying new trend, the last gives it a human face.
The scare about adolescent drug use had several poster children,
most of
them teens whose sad stories were told only in their hometown newspapers and
local newscasts, or in passing on TV newsmagazines. One notable exception, a
young woman named Miki Koontz, attracted attention from the national media,
where her story was told repeatedly for a couple of years. The way in which
much of the media told Miki's story-as a heart-pounding true-crime story
(even with a chase scene) but with important details omitted further
illustrates something we have seen before. People's stories seldom make the
simple or singular point that journalists profess they do.
A "homecoming queen, cheerleader, and above-average student
whose bags were
packed for college" (Associated Press), Miki inexplicably became a crackhead
and lost her life as a result, the media reported. America has fallen far,
the articles said or implied, when such a thing can happen to a "very, very
nice" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) girl from Williamson, West Virginia, a town
of 4,300 straight out of a Jimmy Stewart movie (the drugstore still has a
soda fountain).
The villain of these pieces, Jerry Warren, a black man in his
mid-forties,
sold crack out of his home to the tune of $30,000 a month and enticed local
white kids to get hooked. Miki and the chump of the piece, Chris Pennington,
were among Warren's customers.
Miki and Chris made for an unexpected but endearing duo, the story
went.
Homely, learning disabled, the son of a coal miner, Chris seemed an unlikely
friend for a "petite brunette with hazel eyes" (Associated Press) whose
father was a millionaire coal executive. But Miki and Chris had been buddies
since sixth grade. "Miki never put me down when friends of hers did," Chris
recalled to a reporter. He had not wanted to put Miki in harm's way, but he
found himself in a tough bind. Unemployed and struggling to support a little
boy he had fathered with a woman he picked up in a bar, Chris owed Jerry
Warren $2,000-a debt that Warren offered to erase if Chris delivered Miki to
him at a predetermined time and place.
So on August 25, 1995, Chris asked Miki to pick him up and drive
him to go
get some pot. Outside of town Chris reached into his pants, pulled out a
knife, pressed it against Miki's side, and told her where to drive. What
followed was like a scene out of some rustic remake of Pulp Fiction. For
more than an hour they drove around, Miki thinking Chris was joking with
her, Chris growing increasingly anxious and insistent, until finally he
instructed her to park the car near a sewer plant. There, Jerry Warren was
waiting. Believing that Miki had been snitching on him to the police, he
ordered her out of the car and commanded Chris to shoot her with a rifle.
Chris tried to refuse, but Warren threatened to shoot them both if he did
not comply.
"Miki knelt on the ground and asked to pray. Saying nothing, Chris
pointed
the rifle at Miki's head, closed his eyes, turned his head and fired," an
article in Rolling Stone recounted. The next thing he heard, Chris said, was
"a gargling sound of blood running from her head. Like when you're pouring
water out of a bottlegloop, gloop, gloop."
The Rolling Stone piece, in line with other coverage of middle-class
American kids undone by drugs, put much of the blame on the dealer. Jerry
Warren had "enormous power over ... previously untouchable middle-class
white girls," the magazine quoted an assistant U.S. attorney. But unlike
other stories about Miki Koontz in the news media and a tabloid TV shows,
the article in Rolling Stone provided some telling detailsMiki was not, in
fact a Tipper Gore-in-training debutante living the ideal life in a bucolic
hamlet. Nor did she suddenly become a crack addict, thereby proving that the
same could happen to any mother's child before she realizes that something
has gone awry. Way back when Miki was still in kindergarten her parents had
formally divorced but agreed to live together for the sake of appearances
and to raise Miki and her sister. Not until Miki's senior year in high
school did her father finally move out of the house. By then he had tong
since lost his fortune and twice filed for bankruptcy in this gloomy
Appalachian town where unemployment stood at nearly 14 percent and half of
the population had left since the 195Os.
Miki fought frequently with her mother and had two friends in jail.
Upon
being named Homecoming Queen, she wrote a friend"I really wish fucking
some other prep bitch would have got it so it would be them and I could be
myself ...I'm not growing up, I'm just burning out."
Well before her death Miki was using drugs and alcohol, sometimes
heavily,
but, significantly, crack was not her drug of choice. Casting her as a
crackhead allowed for well-turned headlines such as "A Crack in the
All-American Dream" (Post-Gazette) and for pseudosociological subplots about
the migration of a big-city drug to the countryside. But Miki's sister and
others close to her said she had used crack only a couple of times. By and
large she stuck to marijuana, alcohol, and Somas, a prescription muscle
relaxant.
The Roofie Myth
If Miki Koontz's story illustrates anything, it is reporters' penchant
for
chalking up drug deaths to whatever substance they're on about at the
moment. The details of Kurt Cobain in 1994 and Smashing Pumpkins'
keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin in 1996 were catalogued as part of "a
resurgence in heroin use in the '90s," though both musicians used a variety
of legal and illicit substances, and Cobain died not from a heroin overdose
but suicide. News reports asserted, without evidence, that Cobain "killed
himself because he couldn't kick his heroin habit" But a month before his
suicide, when he had come close to death from an overdose, the drug in
question was not heroin. Cobain had fallen into a coma after overdosing on
champagne and Rohypnol, a prescription sleeping aid.
Why has there been no national hysteria over the mixing of alcohol
and
prescription medication, a commonplace in overdose fatalities-or, for that
matter, simply over the abuse of prescription drugs, the category that sends
adolescents to emergency rooms more often than cocaine, heroin, marijuana,
and LSD combined?
Exponentially more stories about drug abuse focus on illegal drugs
than on
legal drugs. The reason cannot be that there is little to report about
prescription drug abuse. My examination of the relatively small number of
investigative reports that have appeared in the major news media
demonstrates this fact. An article in the Washington Post made reference to
studies suggesting that one in six physicians regularly uses opiates and one
in nine regularly uses tranquilizers and sleeping pills. The article pointed
out that long hours, coupled with stressful changes in the medical
profession over the last several years and easy access to drugs make doctors
vulnerable to addiction. A report on National Public Radio, meanwhile, noted
that a significant number of doctors with addiction problems pretend
otherwise and receive no treatment.
Then there's the elderly. Thanks in part to careless prescribing and
pressures put on doctors by insurers and HMOs to spend little or no time
with patients, millions of elderly Americans are at risk of becoming
dependent on tranquilizers. According to one recent study, 2.8 million women
sixty years and older abuse psychiatric medications. Yet as an article in
the Los Angeles Times observed, no one actually knows how many older
Americans misuse drugs. In stark contrast to the torrent of statistics about
teenage drug use, we know little about drug use in old age. Our relative
lack of information speaks volumes about our national inattention both to
the elderly and to prescription drug abuse.
There is also the vital question of why women in the United States
are twice
as likely as men to be prescribed psychotropic drugs. Apart from coverage in
feminist publications such as Ms., stories about sexism in the prescribing
of drugs almost never appear. Moreover, how many of the 50 million Americans
who take Prozac and similar antidepressants either do not need or do not
benefit from the pills they pop each day? How many suffer side effects that
exceed the benefits they receive from the drugs?
Politicians' dependence on the pharmaceutical industry for campaign
contributions and the news media's dependence on them for advertising
revenues probably has something to do with which forms of drug abuse they
most bemoan. In the 1996 election cycle alone drug company PACs dispersed
$1.6 million to federal campaigns. And pharmaceutical companies, America's
most profitable industry, are among the nation's biggest spenders on
television, magazine, and newspaper advertising.
For the abuse of a pharmaceutical to get star billing it has to be
recast
as something exotic. The drug that helped put Kurt Cobain in a coma, for
instance, received little attention in the media in the late l980s and early
1990s, when it was a popular choice in parts of this country and Africa
among people looking to get high. A single pill makes you feel as drunk and
uninhibited as a six-pack of beer, Rohypnol enthusiasts said. "You don't
hear anything bad about it, like heroin or crack, where people die or
anything," the New York Times quoted a high school senior in Miami in 1995,
in one of the few stories about Rohypnol that appeared in the national news
media prior to 1996, and among a small number that ever took note of the
most common reasons why women and men take the drug.
In 1996 through 1998 stories about Rohypnol appeared by the
hundreds, but
use of the pill to get high was scarcely mentioned. Christened the
"date-rape drug" and referred to as "roofie," Rohypnol was presented to the
American public as "a loaded gun... a weapon used to facilitate sexual
assault" (Senator Joseph Biden). "Rape Is Only Thing That This Drug Is For,"
read a headline in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Dubbed by reporters "the
mightiest Mickey Finn ever concocted," Rohypnol represented, according to a
story in the Dallas Morning News, "all the fears of parents whose daughters
have hit dating age packed into one white pill the size of a dime."
Every so often a journalist would do a follow-up report on a
much-hyped
"roofies rape" from the recent past and let it be known that Rohypnol had
not actually been involved. Mostly, though, journalists heedlessly repeated
vague assertions from the police ("lots of girls have been coming in..."),
and they proffered unfounded generalizations of their own. "Rohypnol has
become a favorite tool of predators," USA Today asserted in 1996, though
almost any authority on rape could have told them that the percentage of all
rapes committed with Rohypnol was a tiny number.
There is good reason to suspect that in fact the total number of
assaults
accomplished with the aid of Rohypnol was small. I searched widely for sound
studies of the true prevalence and found only one, but it was telling. From
mid-1996 through mid-1998, while the roofie scare was in full bloom,
Hoffmann-La Roche, the Swiss company that makes the drug, provided test kits
to rape-crisis centers, hospital emergency rooms, and police throughout the
country. Rape victims who believed they had been drugged were asked to
provide a sample of their urine, which was sent to an independent laboratory
for analysis. Of the 1,033 tests returned, only six contained Rohypnol.
About one-third of the samples contained no drugs; the remainder contained a
variety of legal and illegal substances, alcohol being far and away the most
common.
That other countries were not reporting outbreaks also says
something.
Hoffmann-La Roche takes in about $100 million annually from sales of
Rohypnol, which has been on the market since 1975. Two million people in
eighty countries worldwide swallow one to two pills a day by prescription.
But in the United States the drug is illegal. Does it truly seem likely that
the only place experiencing an "epidemic" (Los Angeles Times) of roofie
rapes would be where molesters have to rely on a black market rather than
simply reach into a medicine cabinet?
Mickey Finn to the Rescue
Roofie stories did not contain great truth, but they did help redirect
controversies in convenient ways. Rohypnol may have been utilized by only a
small proportion of rapists, and few abusers may have used it for sexual
assaults. But for a range of people, from the President of the United States
to jaded readers of local newspapers, roofies provided a tidy way of talking
about matters that had become messy.
In his bid for reelection in 1996 Bill Clinton staged an event three
weeks
before voters went to the polls. Fighting a lawsuit brought against him by
Paula Jones, who said he summoned her to a hotel room, opened his pants, and
asked her to kiss his penis, Clinton held a highly publicized ceremony at
which he signed an antidrug bill. The drug in question was not marijuana,
which Clinton had already confessed on TV he wished he had inhaled. Standing
on the tarmac at the Denver airport, a line of police officers as his
backdrop, Clinton signed a bill providing a twenty-year prison sentence for
anyone who used roofies or similar drugs to commit sexual assault,
symbolically demonstrating his opposition both to drug abuse and to
acquaintance rape.
For journalists and their audiences of the mid- and late l990s the
roofie
narrative served a somewhat different purpose. It afforded a clear and
uncontroversial explanation for a phenomenon that had been hotly but
unsatisfyingly debated for more than a decade. When studies came out in the
1980s indicating that one in three female college students is forced to have
sex against her will, feminist groups played up the findings. Before long a
backlash developed. Conservative columnists and politicians disputed the
statistics, and in 1993 Katie Roiphe, a recent Harvard grad, launched her
writing career with a polemic titled The Morning After. Condemning women she
called "rape-crisis feminists," Roiphe spoke of a "grey area in which
someone's rape may be another person's bad night."
Compared to debates about how to define rape or whether radical
feminists
or rabid conservatives are more dangerous to women, stories about roofies
were interesting and easy to follow. Graphic and mildly prurient, they
focused on entirely blameless women, such as the freshman at Clemson
University who was given a drink at a fraternity party and taken to three
different locations where she was raped by at least thirteen men.
In the media women like her supplanted typical victims of
acquaintance
rape, who are very much awake when they find themselves being attacked by
men they know. More recent research on date rape-research that defines rape
more narrowly -still finds an appalling problem. One in five college women
reports she has been forced to have sexual intercourse. Usually the attacker
is a friend or a man she was dating, a fact obscured in the furor over
date-rape drugs.
Once the roofie scare began to die down media attention shifted to
gamma
hydroxybutric acid (GHB), promptly dubbed the "new" date-rape drug. Used for
almost two decades by partygoers for a high and by bodybuilders as an
alternative to steroids, GHB was suddenly depicted as "the Mickey Finn of
the '90s" (Chicago Sun-Times), more dangerous than roofies.
And so the cycle continued.
A Review of "Culture of Fear"
By Don Beck
Fear is everywhere in America. We seem to live in a movie-of-the-week world
At any moment a man (Black, Hispanic, or Asian), infected with a
flesh-eating virus, could rip open your car door, throw you to the pavement
and drive off (with your child) to the airport where a pregnant teenager
(high on crack cocaine) has commandeered a charter plane taking senior
citizens to Florida, which crashes after takeoff killing everyone on board.
Get a grip!!! In his new book, Barry Glassner takes no prisoners as he hacks
his way through the jungle of misinformation that has made Americans afraid
to mail a letter (crazy postal workers!!). Glassner argues that our
political leaders, big business, the media, and a wide variety of
special-interest groups work together to create a "culture of fear" based on
sensationalism, misinterpreted statistics, racism, and misogyny.
Professor Glassner exposes our fears for what they arefraudulent bogeymen.
Rather than confront serious racial problems, we complain that "gangsta" rap
is destroying our moral fiber; rather than regulate the access to firearms
in our homes we moan about children committing murders in the schoolyard;
and rather than grapple with longstanding gender and economic inequality we
point to teen mothers as single-handedly subverting civilization. Filled
with real-life examples, The Culture of Fear shows that our worst fears are
often based on cultural myths
Myth — Depraved children (brainwashed by television violence) roam our
schools waiting to gun down teachers, parents, and fellow students. In
reality, children under thirteen committed homicide less often in the
mid-1990s than in 1965.
Myth — Liberals, acting like Nazi Brown-Shirts, have taken over our
universities and in the name of "political correctness" deprived us of
Shakespeare. Glassner shows that it has been Republican budget cuts in
education and the arts that have reduced funding for Shakespeare studies,
and that the "PC" label is really a way to avoid debate over racial and
gender inequalities.
Myth — Teen mothers are destroying civilization. As one journalist said, they
"breed criminals faster than society can jail them." Glassner responds that
they are victims of "the most sweeping, bipartisan, multimedia,
multi-disciplinary scapegoating operation of the late twentieth century,"
and shows that it is poverty and lack of educational opportunity rather than
motherhood that is the problem.
"Culture of Fear" exposes the way fear is created in this country.
Glassner examines the hidden connections between politicians who
periodically whip up the war on drugs and businesses who benefit from the
boom in prison construction. He details the way special-interest groups
raise money by exaggerating the risks of disease, and he explains that in
the cases of Gulf War Syndrome and Dow-Corning breast implants perception
has overwhelmed the evidence of scientific fact.
By any measure fear itself is a national crisis. Whether it's sex on the
internet, poisoned halloween candy, or drugged-out ghetto dwellers, Glassner
argues that a crisis mentality distracts us from the very real problems of
child abuse, hunger, and discrimination. Revolving around women, children,
and minorities our baseless fears often place them in the uncomfortable
position of being both victim and victimizer. The Culture of Fear makes the
courageous argument that we must bridge the gap between perception and
reality, and that isolated events, no matter how tragic, cannot be the basis
for our nation's public policy.
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